Love-hate relationship: EEs and IP

Ron Wilson, EE Times
(12/12/2005 9:00 AM EST)

There's an inherent contradiction in how engineers think about intellectual property. On the one hand, they seek out IP, expecting it to reduce their design time, resource requirements and risk. On the other hand, they believe that adopting external IP will introduce unknown risks into the design. They assume, based on prior experience, that the IP will not function entirely as described, that it will not drop smoothly into the chip design, that it will require some tweaks to work in their tool flow and that the verification support for the block may be, at best, lame.

So what is going on here? Are engineers simply irrational about IP? Not really.

Knowing that IP is necessary in order to meet schedules, engineers find it. But knowing that integrating the IP will not be a pushbutton process, they search at least as much for a vendor that will work with them on integration and verification as for exactly the right piece of IP. In fact, they may ask a trusted vendor to develop a block it doesn't currently offer.

The centrality of vendor relationships was one of a number of interesting points that emerged from our study of intellectual-property selection habits. Another was simply the pervasiveness of the problem-solving ethos in which engineers are trained. In our focus groups, many engineers said their approach to IP selection was quite ad hoc. Yet in the large-sample study, we learned that even those who thought they were having an easy time of it followed essentially the same process as those who considered the problem difficult and approached it formally.

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